Heirs of Evil
by ThatTinyRedhead
Summary: When the Villain Kids came to Auradon Prep, they had one goal: steal Fairy Godmother's wand and return it to their parents. But with their own secrets and even their parents doubtful that they will succeed, they must decide between doing what is wrong and what is easy.


A/N - For the record, I have not written fanfiction in a long time. But I've recently become obsessed with Descendants and ever since I saw the first one, all I could think was that had the story been more Grimm styled, it could have been a much darker plot and wouldn't have the cheesy lines or perfect happy ending. And so spawned this idea. Think of it as a dark retelling, with some twists and turns along the way.

Disclaimer - I do not own the Descendants movie, music, or anything else belonging to the franchise. All the characters appearing are the creation of the writers of the Descendants movie and do not belong to me. I just like borrowing them.

Out of the other three people in the limo, Evie was the only one Mal could say she really knew.

Of course, her mother never let her have real friends. Anytime she showed a trace of fondness for anyone, even if it was a simple, "Can I go to the Evil Queen's house to study with Evie?" she would be harshly reprimanded. But that didn't stop them from talking at school or walking back toward their homes together. It certainly didn't stop them from sneaking out and causing mischief on the weekends, especially on Uma down by the docks when they could sneak past Ursula's security squids. She called Evie her friend only in her mind, where even her magic wielding mother couldn't control her.

She knew about Jay and Carlos, even if she didn't really know them. Every villain kid knew each other, at least by reputation. Jay was known for stealing things (Mal had hexed him once for stealing her golden pen out of her backpack), just like the nemesis of his ex-sultan, ex-genie father. Jafar ran a pawn shop near the docks and got Jay to do his bidding for him whenever possible. He was known for skipping school and sneaking through the streets, nicking things from people's pockets. Everyone on the Isle of the Lost knew that if something went missing, it was probably at the pawn shop.

Carlos was a bit more tame than the other villains' kids. Son of Cruella de Vil and two years younger than the others, he mainly just tagged along whenever he could. Mal had seen him hanging around Jay once or twice at school and seemed to be trying to emulate the older boy, but Jay usually just shrugged the fourteen year old off - or took whatever petty cash the poor kid had on him.

And as they sat in the limo on their way to Auradon, she realized that they had two things in common.

The first was that none of them wanted to be there.

The second was that if they were going to be forced into a preppy school with pastel drenched, spoiled kids of heroes and princes and princesses, they needed to keep some things hidden.

"Okay," Mal said, breaking the silence in the back of the limo. Well, near silence. Carlos and Jay had found the snacks in the bar and wear chowing down on chocolate in every form while Evie snacked gracefully on a hunk of rock candy. "We need to come up with a plan."

They all glanced toward the partition that separated them from the driver. He didn't roll it down to check on them after Mal's voice broke through, so they figured it was sound proof enough to talk.

"Plan for what?" Jay asked through a mouthful of chocolate. "We steal the wand or our parents drag us back to the Isle and lock us up forever. Not that hard." He rolled his eyes and went back to eating.

Mal gave him the side eye and pulled her hair away from her face as she thought of how to get through to the boys, who wanted nothing more than to eat food until Auradon kicked them out.

"We need a better plan than just steal the wand," Evie piped up, crossing her legs and leaning back in the seat, perfectly at ease. She seemed to have no problem with the fancy arrangements of the limo or the food. Maybe Mal was wrong - maybe they didn't all want to get back to the Isle. "We need to figure out where it is and how to get it. I doubt Fairy Godmother over there is just going to hand it over the first time we see her."

"Thank you Evie," Mal said gratefully, looking at the blue-haired girl beside her. "But that wasn't really what I was talking about." Subconsciously, she pulled her sleeves further down her wrists.

Evie was the only one that noticed the slight movement and did the same, subtly stretching her skirt further down her legs.

The boys didn't notice, but they would have had similar reactions had they been paying even the slightest bit attention.

All the kids on the Isle had scars. Some were the self-inflicted wounds of teenagers who hated their lives on the Isle, though those were few and far between. Some were accidental, from accidents in their mischievous routines. But, at least in Mal's experience, in her sixteen years on the Isle, most scars came from their own parents.

Villains hated nothing more than disappointment. When Jay couldn't bring home enough loot for the day, when Evie couldn't get a date with at least the child of a somewhat well-known villain, when Carlos didn't do a good enough job cleaning his mother's furs, or when Mal flubbed a spell for more than the second time. Nothing was hated more by their parents than their failures at being evil. Jay was expected to be the slyest thief on the Isle; Carlos was told to keep their home spotless and to never forget to scrub off his mother's bunions; Evie's mother wanted her to be cunning and manipulative, to get into the hearts of every boy and man on the Isle; and Mal… Mal was expected to be perfect.

They all had their ways of paying for their shortcomings. For Carlos, it was more emotional manipulation than anything. His mother had instilled such a fear of dogs in Carlos that it took all of his willpower just to clean the furs she had. For Evie it was similar, with her mother belittling and berating her at every turn. However, they had both been on the receiving ends of the claws of their mothers and had the crescent shaped marks on their upper arms to prove it. Carlos even had a small scar under his left eye from having a fur brush thrown at his head once that he couldn't duck to avoid. Evie had her own scars, some like the self-inflicted kind that she thought no one knew about, on the upper part of her left thigh. But Mal had seen them once when Evie's skirt had torn in an alley brawl with Uma, though she had never mentioned them.

For Jay, it was beatings. If he didn't bring home enough stuff at the end of the day, he'd usually be hit until first blood was spilled or he fell unconscious. He managed to avoid the worst of it by sometimes stealing from the pawn shop on his way in. Jafar was horrible at keeping inventory on his shop if it wasn't within reach of the counter, so Jay had managed to get away with it. He couldn't always avoiding getting hit, though. He had scars on

For Mal, it was different. Maleficent prefered not to get her hands dirty, so she relied on magic to be punishment. Some spells made her feel pain, others took away all feeling. One spell in particular caused blisters to erupt under a piece of magic rope that Maleficent liked to tie around Mal's wrists to test her knowledge of spells. If she got the spell wrong, her wrists would blister. There were permanent marks looping both her wrists because of that spell and rope.

There was a long silence in the limo as Mal waited for Carlos and Jay to pay attention, and when they did, they looked at their laps quietly.

Mal swallowed hard and looked down at the bag in her lap. Then, with nearly shaking hands, she pulled her mother's spell book from it.

Evie gasped and Jay and Carlos blanched. "Your mother gave you her spellbook?" Evie asked in awe.

Mal shook her head once, locking eyes with her friend, whose eyes widened.

"I knew I wouldn't be able to do any magic here without it," Mal said easily. "And she won't even realize it's gone." She began flipping through the pages, remembering that there was a spell in there somewhere that would help with their issues. The three other villain kids watched with envy as Mal scanned over a book that belonged to one of the most evil people on the planet.

She found the page, "A Spell to Hide Scars," and quickly read it. It had no incantation, just the basics of the spell, how it worked, and how it could be reversed.

"It says that you can only hide the scars from people who don't know about them," Mal said slowly, absorbing the information. "If someone finds out about the scars, the spell will allow them to see them."

"So, what," Evie said, "all of you would be able to see my scars but no one in Auradon would?"

Mal shrugged and closed the book, remembering what she needed to do. "That seems about right."

"Then how will we know if it works?" Jay asked, shifting in his seat, as if movement could make him forget about the marks on his arms and back, where many of the scarring blows had landed.

Mal shrugged. "I guess we'll have to risk it. I mean, I'm not going in there showing any kind of weakness to those preppy little princesses. Are you?" She did a motion with her hands over herself and felt the little tingle that jolted through her when she performed magic. She had watched herself in the mirror once, when she did that hair color changing spell, and knew that her eyes glowed bright green, just like her mother's, when she did magic.

She glanced down at her wrists and saw what she did anytime she saw them now - blister scarred rings around them. They looked no different, though she was sure the spell worked. She wouldn't know until she met someone at Auradon.

The other three looked at her expectantly. She held up her wrists and said, "I'm sure it worked, but we won't know until we get there."

They all conceded to having the spell on them and Mal did the specific hand motion over each of them so they would be covered by her magic. She felt the tingle each time; there was no way it couldn't have worked. With that spell book, she could do any kind of magic she wanted.

Maybe she could finally make her mother proud.

The driver rolled down the partition just moments after Mal finished. "We're almost there," the driver warned through the crack before rolling it up again. It was clear he didn't approve of the children of villains coming to stay in Auradon. But he'd had no choice. By order of the prince, soon to be king, four specific children of villains were to be brought to Auradon to be treated like everyone else and get a second shot at life.

If only it were that easy.

Back on the Isle, in a little apartment on the coast, Maleficent opened the safe where she kept her spell book, intending to use a spell to make dinner so she didn't have to cook. She turned the lock and opened it to - emptiness.

As the barrier between Auradon and the Isle of the Lost closed, Maleficent screamed.


End file.
